In a bid to weed out frauds, the government has decided that all its employees should have the Aadhar Unique Identification Number (UID) to draw their salary. Maharashtra will be the first state in the country to implement the system. The UID will have demographic and biometric information of an individual. The government, which has nearly 37 lakh staffers, hopes that the system will stop corruption among unscrupulous employees, who have...

As the political drama surrounding the fast undertaken by social activist Anna Hazare made way for the 10-member drafting committee for a Lokpal Bill, the Bharatiya Janata Party's stance has changed slowly but surely from open support to the Hazare-led group to scepticism. Within a day of Mr. Hazare sitting on fast here, BJP president Nitin Gakari said the social activist's views on the Lokpal Bill were “reasonably correct” and his...

Itself the outcome of a bottom-up movement, the Jan Lokpal bill ironically proposes a centralised framework against graft. Without checks and balances. There was never any doubt that India needs a strong Lokpal Act. The protest has paved the way for its enactment. With the exultation over the anti-corruption campaign’s ‘victory’ quieting down, it’s time to take stock. Nuanced arguments—and indeed substance—have to recover lost ground to take the discourse...

Late last month we received the exciting news that India now has a population of 1.21 billion. This figure generated less discussion than I expected. Maybe it would have been more mind-boggling a few months ago, before all the scams and scandals inured us to the large number of zeros that a billion signifies. Or maybe we were distracted by the other bad news in the census results — the...

It is not often that a social security programme the size of Mahatma Gandhi NREGS - New Delhi has spent Rs 40,000 crore on it in 2010/11 alone - faces an existential moment. But, April 2011 will present one such crossroad: the end of the term of a bureaucrat widely acknowledged as the prime mover behind the five-year old scheme. Brought in six years ago to the Centre from her parent...